Kristen Roupenian - You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

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Many thanks to the journals in which these stories first appeared, some in edited form: Bad Boy in Body Parts Magazine , Cat Person in The New Yorker , Scarred (as Dont Be Scarred) in Writers Digest , and The Night Runner in Colorado Review. Thank you as well to the Hopwood Foundation for its support of The Night Runner and The Matchbox Sign.

For my mother, Carol Roupenian, who taught me to love what scares me

Contents

He sez

There is something jerking

in your ribcage

that is not a heart

It is cow-intestine white

& fibrous & gilled

Lara Glenum, Pulchritude

Bad Boy

Our friend came over the other night. He and his terrible girlfriend had finally broken up. This was his third breakup with that particular girlfriend, but he insisted it was going to be the one to stick. He paced around our kitchen, working his way through the ten thousand petty humiliations and torments of their six-month relationship, while we cooed and fretted and bent our faces into sympathetic shapes in his direction. When he went to the bathroom to collect himself, we collapsed against each other, rolling our eyes and pretending to strangle ourselves and shoot ourselves in the head. One of us told the other that listening to our friend complain about the details of his breakup was like listening to an alcoholic whine about being hungover: yes, the suffering was there but good God it was hard to muster sympathy for someone with so little insight into the causes of his own problems. How long was our friend going to continue to date terrible people and then act surprised when they treated him terribly, we asked each other. Then he came out of the bathroom and we mixed him his fourth drink of the evening and told him he was too drunk to drive home but that he was welcome to crash on our couch.

That night, we lay in bed together, talking about our friend. We complained about how small our apartment was, about how we couldnt have sex without him hearing us. Maybe we should do it anyway, we saiditll be the closest to getting laid hes come in months. (Withholding sex had been one of the manipulative strategies of the terrible girlfriend.) Maybe hed like it.

The next morning, when we got up for work, our friend was still asleep, his shirt half-unbuttoned. He was surrounded by crumpled beer cans and hed clearly kept drinking alone long after wed gone to bed. He looked so pathetic, lying there, that we felt bad about how meanly wed joked about him the night before. We made extra coffee and fed him breakfast and told him he could stay at our apartment as long as he wanted, but when we got home we were nonetheless surprised to find him on the couch.

We made him get up and into the shower, and then we took him out to dinner, where we refused to let him talk about the breakup. Instead, we were charming. We laughed at all his jokes and ordered a second bottle of wine and gave him life advice. You deserve someone who makes you happy, we said. A healthy relationship with someone who loves you, we continued, and we looked at each other appreciatively before turning the full force of our attention onto him. He was like a sad little dog hungry for friendliness and praise, and it felt good to see him lap it up; we wanted to pat his soft head and scratch him behind his ears and watch him wiggle.

After we left the restaurant, we were having such a good time that we invited our friend up to our apartment with us. Once we were there, he asked if he could crash with us again that night, and when we pushed him, he admitted that he didnt like being in his own apartment by himself right now, because home reminded him of the terrible girlfriend. We said, of course, you can stay as long as you want, weve got a pull-out couch, thats what its for. But behind his back we gave each other a look, because even though we wanted to be good to him, we were not going to endure a second night without sexfor one thing, we were drunk, and for another, acting so charming all evening had gotten us kind of worked up. So we went to bed, and even the way we said good night to him probably made it clear that we were going to fuck. At first, we tried not to make a lot of noise, but soon it felt like our efforts to be quiet and then giggling and hushing each other were probably calling more attention to what we were doing than just doing it the normal way, so we did what we wanted and we had to admit we were sort of into it, the idea of him out there, listening to us, in the dark.

The next morning, we were a little embarrassed, but we told ourselves, hey, maybe that was what he needed to nudge him out of the nest and back to his own apartment, and it might even motivate him to get a girlfriend who would sleep with him more than once every two months. But that afternoon, he texted us and asked us what we were doing that evening, and soon, he was staying over most nights of the week.

We would feed him dinner, and then the three of us would drive somewhere, us in the front, him always in the back seat. We joked about giving him an allowance, about giving him chores; we joked that we should adjust our phone contracts to add him to our family plan, since we all spent so much time together. Besides, we said, then we could keep a better eye on him and stop him from texting the terrible ex-girlfriend, because even though they were broken up, they were still in touch and he was always on his phone. He would promise to stop, swear that he knew it was bad for him, but then hed slide right back into texting her again. Mostly, though, we enjoyed spending time with him. We liked fussing over him and taking care of him and scolding him when he did irresponsible things like texting the terrible ex-girlfriend or missing work because hed stayed up too late the night before.

We kept having sex even though he was staying in the apartment with us. In fact, it was the best sex wed ever had. It became the kernel of a fantasy we shared, picturing him out there with his ear pressed to the wall, all churned up by jealousy and arousal and shame. We didnt know if that was truemaybe he covered his head with a pillow and tried to ignore us; maybe our walls were more soundproof than we thoughtbut we pretended, between ourselves, and we would dare each other to leave the bedroom while we were still all flushed and breathless, to get a drink of water from the refrigerator and see if he was awake. If he was (he always was) we would exchange a few casual words with him and then rush back to bed to laugh about it and fuck again even more urgently the second time around.

We got such a charge from the game that we began upping the stakes, coming out half-dressed, or wrapped in towels, leaving the door open a crack, or a little more. In the morning after a particularly raucous night, we would tease him by asking him if he slept well, or what hed dreamed about, and he would look at the ground and say, I dont remember.

This idea he wanted to join us in bed was only a fantasy, but strangely, after a while we started feeling a little bit annoyed at our friend for acting so coy. We knew that if something were going to happen, we would have to make the first move. We outnumbered him, first of all, and second, it was our apartment, and third, that was the way it worked between us: we bossed him around and he did what we asked. But still, we allowed ourselves to be irritable with him, to pick on him a bit, to blame him for our frustrated desires and to tease him a little more cruelly than we had before.